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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
The premise here is off.
There are two key points you are missing. One is that resources don't respawn in the way you are thinking, the second is that you are not able to harvest that much before you need to head home to offload what you have gathered.
Based on that, the idea of attempting to keep a harvesting location to yourself is somewhat laughable.
In L2, we would often pvp or pk people for the prime xp areas.. (wasnt really any gathering as such from memory) but there were very limited prime xp areas and the xp return made them worth every bit of grief.
In BDO, I have travelled to a distant place, stood there to see if it is clear and been dropped by another player without even knowing someone was there.
It will be interesting to see where AOC sits.
A character can hold 1% of a caravan load in their backpack.
These two things don't add up to making the idea of "claiming" unharvested resources a reality in Ashes.
I take no specific issue with your outlook on guild organization being like raid organization.
I think you do have a small blind spot thinking people who prefer to PvP are not willing to be harvesters. PvPers will absolutely harvest nodes. They are going to be out there in the open world anyways. Might as well grab whatever nodes you can before the competition does. To not do this would just be wasteful.
I think there is some truth to guilds granting leniency to other guilds within their nodes. I am sure this will be a thing, but I don't think it will limit PvP that much. You will always have adjacent nodes to fight. This is one of the things I find compelling. In addition to having a vested interest in protecting your own node. You have incentive to take resources from adjacent nodes.
What I like about the node system, is that it looks like it is going to take all of the interesting politics that most sandbox games have for a few "top-dog" guilds at endgame, and divides it up all over the map. At least I am hoping for that. 118 nodes is a lot for a handful of guilds to try and control.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Thing is, this type of harvesting simply won't produce the amount of resources that are likely to be needed for a siege. I wasn't joking earlier in the thread when I said I wouldn't be surprised if a siege of a metropolis made use of a million or more raw materials (note; between both sides).
If you are the kind of player that pays their MMO subscription primarily for PvP, you may well harvest the occasional resource node you come across. You may well even be happy with putting in a months long effort to get the raw materials you need for a siege that you need to harvest yourself because you chased away all the harvesters that would otherwise have obtained more of these raw materials in a day than you and your friends would in a week.
Thing is, if that siege is unsuccessful, you are unlikely to be willing to do all that harvesting again in order to have another try. If not after the first time, then after the second, or the third.
It won't take long before talk of a siege means nothing more than weeks or months of harvesting raw materials to you, rather than the enjoyment of the actual siege.
This is as opposed to a more organized structure where people that enjoy harvesting do that non-stop for you, and you PvP non-stop to protect them and destroy other nodes.
The smart PvP players will go in to the game knowing full well that the best way for them to enjoy the game is to PvP against people that would attack harvesters that are based in the general area, rather than attacking them.
The not-so-smart PvP players will gain this knowledge within 3 months of launch.
As you point out, those people that actually want to sneak around killing everyone in sight, or picking off select targets - they can and will still do that. Thing is, they will head over to the next node cluster to do it (or the one after that), rather than doing it in their own cluster.
The part of this that *some* PvP players around here are not understanding is that there is more to gain by not attacking (or indeed actively defending) those around you than there is to gain by attacking them. It is in every players best interest to be a part of a strong node that is itself a part of a strong node cluster, and the best way to do that is to make sure each node has people harvesting, people PvE'ing, people crafting and people PvP'ing. Since a healthy node cluster will contain several thousand players, the more specalization that can be fostered within each of these roles, the stronger the node will be.
My response was 100% facetious, I wish you would have caught that. Ultimately the game will fall where I make it fall. Since I'll have the option to pvp as much or as little as I want.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
One thing you would probably be true here is the fact that a player adopting this type of mentality in a game like Ashes probably has no real need to concern themselves with the detail of how guild wars work as a system.
I guess that's a bonus of this type of outlook.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
Hahahaha! That would be hilarious!
/petition How do I undelete stuff I just deleted?
GM Response: Why did you delete your stuff?
You: Well, I thought I was going to get killed in PvP so I panicked but then the guy stopped and left me alone.
GM: ...
GM: <daveywavey's account - deleted>
I'm sure there will be, for a while.
The thing with guilds though, is that they have guild sized desires and ambitions. Even if not initially, all guilds eventually get to this point.
Your current outlook on the game prevents any guild you are in from fulfilling those guild sized desires and ambitions. A guild is not able to be a player in the bigger events in this game without help, and guilds with players like you in them will not have that help.
It is not Massively Multiplayer Social Game
It is not Massively Multiplayer Grouping Game.
In MMORPGs, players don't have to be in a group to be social.
Not joining a group is not at all the same thing as not being social.
Especially in Ashes, where we are progressing Nodes every moment we are in the game. And doing so affects other players.
My Bartle Score is Explorer 87%; Socializer 73% ; Achiever 47%; Killer 0%
I am a carebear. I have alts that do the carebear challenge of no kills.
But, my mains do a heck of a lot of killing.
And in KOA: Reckoning, I love garroting NPCs.
That Killer 0% is not 100% accurate - but I do spend a lot of time avoiding combat. It's good enough for a quick summation of my playstyle.
For simplicity's sake, it's easier to discuss with the broad camps of who would typically play on a PvP server, who would typically play on a PvP-Optional server and who would play on a PvE-Only server.
I don't really understand why Steven envisions PvE folk as Crafters. Lots of people who play one PvE-Only servers kill tons of mobs.
And, yes, hardcore PvPers also harvest and craft.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of us in this topic are all on the same page there.
You know what mmorpg doesnt stand for?
Single player video game.
You keep saying you are a carebear. Nobody puts gravity on your words when it comes to a game driven by player conflict and interests.
Most certainly developers of this game wont make changes to the mmo based on what "0% killers" and conflict avoiders want.
Ah, the Bartle Score, I have never heard of it before. After doing myself, I am intrigued at the results:
- 60% Achiever
- 53% Killer
- 47% Explorer
- 40% Socialiser
I wonder what others might score, which in turn might indicate the bias that perhaps the posts don`t often showhttps://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/index.php
Does anyone else understand this rambling?
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
As far as accuracy, I think it’s accurate in what it’s trying to do, but so what? Basically it asks if you like to be social and if you say yes, it gives you a higher score at being social. It asks if you like fighting other players, and if you say no it lowers the Killer score. And so on.
So basically it gives you a very abstract picture of your general role-playing preferences as you see them. It’s just a reflection of your self-image of what you think you like to do. How useful that is, not really useful at all; I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone surprised by the results of the test. It’s just telling you what you already know, or what you think you like to do.
So maybe you’ve only tried PvP a few times in games that poorly implemented it, and so your bad experiences make you shy away from it. If you play good and meaningful PvP you might love it. But the Bartle test can’t tell you that, it will only reflect your preexisting bias against that gameplay. And the same for the other categories.
I think what he is trying to say here is that you are the type of player that would recklessly start wars and hold back whatever guild you are in by initiating PvP with your "The king PvPs as much as he like" additude. I disagree with him here. I don't know that he has lived in a open world game with PvP.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Half of the questions lacked context that would allow me to answer the questions correctly. "Would I rather have a private chat channel or a nice house?" I read that and think? Did the WOW devs write this? You can have basic chat features or player housing. I get that the point is to ask probing questions and use them to populate metrics about what the player finds important. The problem is that I adjust my play style to the game I am playing. In WOW/FFXIV I go pure PvE raider and just want to kill bosses. In Eve/L2 I want to be involved in a guild that is doing stuff that has an effect on the world. In DDO/POE I want to have the best shit. There is no "in general " for me. Maybe its just because I am a Gemini and have multiple people living inside me or something. XD
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
It is more a case of me not thinking most PvP focused players would be willing to spend 75%+ of their time online harvesting materials - which is what would be needed by for players wanting to siege metropolis nodes without the support of large numbers of harvesters. Remember, the work involved in sieging a metropolis is roughly equal to the work it took to build it. It takes many weeks (likely 2 months) to build a metropolis, and will involve several thousand players. Preparing for a siege will be done by a few hundred people, and they need to still put in that same amount of effort as those few thousand did. Not all of that effort will be in harvesting raw materials, but it is a safe assumption that a lot of it will be.
The quantity of materials needed for crafting equipment and the quantity of items needed for a siege are not really comparible. Of the games you listed, the only one that has situations where that quantity of materials are put to use is EVE, and battles on that scale in EVE only happen every few years. If PvP players want these sieges to happen every few months, they need essentially full time harvesters working behind them to make that happen.
Again, I am not saying I don't expect PvP players to harvest - if I expect harvesters to PvP then I obviously expect PvP players to harvest. Thing is, in both situations, if you have a PvP player that is harvesting more than any other activity, or a harvester that is PvP'ing more than any other activity, you have a generally unhappy player - or at least a player that is significantly less happy than they could be.
Close.
Imagine you are leader of a guild of players that want to spend most of their online time PvP'ing. They are happy doing other things as well, but want to PvP as much as possible.
Now imagine that you have harvesters working in and around your node, and they are spending many, many hours a day harvesting raw materials - meaning your node has all the raw materials up for sale that your guild could want. With these materials, your guild is able to organize a siege on a metropolis.
Now imagine you have a few players like Tyrantor join your guild. They attack and kill these harveters at will - which naturally results in these harvesters leaving your general area, moving to an entierly different node cluster. All of a sudden, you don't have that same quantity of raw materials up on the market, but your guild still wants to organize sieges.
So now, as a guild leader, you have to explain to your guild that because of these new recruits, the guild has to spend a month harvesting the raw materials for the siege themselves.
You now have to seriously question whether these new players that joined your guild are actually a good thing for your guild or not. Is your guild happy with this new way that things need to be done, just so these few players could attack those harvesters for a minute or two worth of enjoyment?
73% Explorer
47% Socialiser
40% Achiever
40% Killer
Explains why I'm always so conflicted, given that I have 200% of a person inside my head...
47% Socialiser
40% Achiever
33% Killer
Accurate but idk about that math
While it is probably right that Daveywavey scores higher in Killer, and Caeryl scores higher in Explorer, the results are far too similar to reflect how different the two of you look at games.
Hahaha, yeah!
I wonder if we could put together a better "test".....